Pasta: Food As The Common Man`s Art

September 06, 1985|By Jay Pridmore.

The booths are boxy and make the place look like a coffeehouse from a hipper time. The carpentry looks as if it might have been done by some guys from Colorado who got lost in their VW microbus. The prices are vintage 1970s, as is the taped-in music: Kinks, Animals, Motown.

Welcome to Dave`s Italian Kitchen. You have walked into a phenomenon. And even in time-warpy Evanston, the ambiance is as suspect as the name. In a day of flashy restaurant design and regional Italian specialties, Dave`s has neither. But it has crowds. There`s always a wait at Dave`s, though rarely too long. Northwestern students, couples, families. Nobody makes a policy of staying away from this restaurant. The pasta is good and the prices are very good.

Yes, things are going Dave Glatt`s way lately, 13 years after he opened an eight-table restaurant a couple of blocks from his present location at 906 Church St., Evanston. ``When I opened,`` he said, ``I thought there was room, both in the marketplace and morally, for making something that worked like it should.``

He was in his early 20s, and his experience working (as deliverer to a bookkeeper) in other restaurants left him amazed, truly amazed, that ``owners would go to great lengths to avoid using butter or good olive oil`` to cut costs. With `60s-style earnestness, Glatt left the study of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago and opened a place for himself.

Amazingly, Dave`s didn`t collapse under the weight of idealism. He talks convincingly about the ``Zen of cooking. . .When you are working well, and doing things right, there is a certain feeling that takes over. It is like a sense of being. You can get very deep into it.`` Fortunately for people who like carbonara, baked mostaccioli and lasagna, he chose pasta, as well as huge salads with rich, garlicky dressing. As if it was a political statement (he suggests it is), all this costs little more than what you would pay for breakfast elsewhere in Evanston.

It is a great success story, and not just for the proprietor, who still works in his kitchen every night, making pizzas in his huge industrial ovens and packing them up for carryout. It also is a great success for his customers. Many of them come from what Glatt calls the ``wine subsociety``--

wine connoisseurs--whom he charms by having great knowledge of California vineyards, and marking the bottles up only a few dollars. For this and other reasons, Dave`s is more amazing to knowledgeable patrons than it is to casual ones.

One wonders why. Dedication is part of it. Morality is part of it. But one must understand that the food he has chosen is part of it, too. Pasta is the essential ingredient in this interesting story. Chances are he would not have made it in a steak house, or a fried chicken hut, or even a Chinese restaurant. Pasta has the right feel.

Why? It`s cheap. It can be cooked in a variety of ways and carries many different flavors. It pleases everyone from children to sophisticates. It is simple, has tradition. It is nutritious and bountiful. You could even say it is the most universal of foods. Glatt would not disagree. Via pasta, he has gone from being an impoverished delivery boy to someone who is comfortable enough to spend time and money at his hobby--recording his own rock and roll compositions.

Unfortunately and inevitably, it appears there is a movement afoot to deal harshly with pasta, at least to the extent that some chain restaurant corporations are making noises about opening eateries that feature pasta in much the same way that they offered us Mexican a few years ago. One supposes that it makes sense. Costs are cheap. Dishes are familiar. They can sell a lot of wine with a spicy tomato sauce.

But it won`t be the same as if it came from Dave`s, or from Randy Postiglione, who runs Postiglione`s Pasta Bar, 1737 W. Touhy Ave. This place has the same kind of pleasant informality, a reflection of the owner, an Italian boy who fell into this business after a notion to market his spaghetti sauce turned into a plan for a restaurant with lots of sauces.

It is an odd and pleasant surprise to walk into the Pasta Bar. It is in a house on a not-too-well-traveled road, has a nice Victorian interior, and serves decent cabernet sauvignon by the glass. In the middle of the main room is a steam table where the pasta bartender serves bucatini, linguini, spaghetti and other types of homemade pasta with different mix-and-match sauces--white, pesto, seafood, vegetable, red meat sauce (both mild and spicy) and others.

The pasta isn`t overcooked. The sauces have flavor. It has a personal touch, in much the same way that a family-owned trattoria does.

The prices are, well, righteous ($7.95 for an all-you-can eat ticket to the pasta bar). Even though Postiglione considers raising his prices, to try to stop his worries about the taxes and mortgage on his house and the costs of running a business, he concludes that the populist`s route is best for him.